Safe House

by Chris Ewan

  The beach, when they found it, was sheltered and mostly pebbled. A narrow track led down to it. There was a turning circle and a white-washed hut at the end of the track. Menser trained his binoculars on the hut. It was canted to one side, the wall bulging in the middle. Plywood sheets had been hammered across the window and door.

  The beach looked OK. The beach would work. Menser called it in, then ducked below deck while Clarke prepped the dinghy.

  The girl was sitting on her bunk, knees tucked up by her chest, chin on her knees. Her bad arm rested on the bunk, palm up, beside a bag of half-eaten potato crisps. The skin of her wrist was swollen and mottled green and mauve. He could see fluid gathered there.

  She didn’t look up at him. Didn’t ask him what he wanted. He thought about saying something. But an explanation implied something. Undermined him. So he showed her the gun and told her to stand. Had her walk out of the cabin in front of him and made her climb the ladder while he trained the gun on her. The ladder wasn’t easy. She had to climb with her good hand, her injured wrist tucked against her chest. He watched her grasping for the next rung, snatching a step up, repeating the process.

  She waited for him at the top, resentful but obedient.

  The dinghy was in the water and Clarke was in the dinghy. A rusted metal ladder was bolted to the hull of the trawler. Clarke had a rope wrapped around a low tread, close to the surface. The dinghy was bobbing on the rolling swell, bumping against the hull.

  Clarke called up to the girl. Her lip curled, and for a moment, Menser thought she might spit.

  He jabbed her forwards with his gun. She grasped the ladder, then cast an accusing look at him.

  ‘Down,’ he said.

  ‘My hand.’ She showed it to him. Gnarled and warped on the end of her arm. It sickened him. The idea of her trying to grip with it. The snag of bone against skin.

  ‘You climbed up,’ he told her. ‘Now you can climb down.’

  He raised the gun. Pointed it at her forehead. Held it there for the count of two until she began to descend. She struggled down three steps before Clarke was able to reach up and pluck her feet from the treads. She shrieked and fell into his arms and wriggled and bucked. Clarke held her tight for a moment too long, a wide grin slashing his face, before swinging her round and settling her on her backside in the bottom of the boat.

  Menser slung his backpack over his shoulder and climbed down the ladder, his gun still gripped in his hand. The treads were slick beneath his feet. He could feel crusted salt under his fingers. A wave rolled in, sea spray wetting his bare scalp. He held fast, the inflatable floating up towards him, then dropping away. His backpack fell from his shoulder and hung from his elbow. He lowered a foot, treading air until the boat pitched up and his toes brushed rubber. Clarke grabbed him by the belt and hauled him inside.

  The dinghy made things awkward. The confinement. The silence. Menser had told Clarke the change of plan and Clarke had absorbed it without comment. But he had to know there would be consequences. Repercussions.

  And then there was the girl. Watching him with a neutral stare, her deformed wrist cradled in her lap. She was assessing him. Reading the change in her predicament. The change between him and Clarke.

  A slow, sickly smile crept across her mouth. Teeth filmed with saliva. White gunk in the corners of her lips. Her unwashed hair greasy against her brow. Her eyes engorged in her gaunt face, like the eyes of an addict. But the light of triumph glimmered deep within them. A victory. Just a small one. She was radiant with it.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  ‘Come back with me to the car,’ Rebecca said. ‘I think you should sit down.’

  I didn’t argue. I wasn’t feeling good. I was groggy and there was a flat droning in my ears. I was trying to think straight, to understand what Rebecca had said to me. Her words kept repeating in my mind. They didn’t make sense. They couldn’t.

  My sister. Laura. With a different name?

  I stumbled sideways. Staggered clumsily across the scree of pebbles and driftwood that had collected near the slipway. The sounds of the beach – the breeze through the sand, the waves collapsing against the shore, a seagull’s squawk – were distorted and perverse.

  ‘Here.’ Rebecca opened my door and guided me into my seat. ‘Head between your knees.’ She gripped me by the back of my neck and pushed my head forwards. I could feel my sweat beneath her fingertips. Hot blood swirled around inside my skull with a violent centrifugal force.

  Rebecca reached into the rear of the car for her backpack. I stayed down, snatching shallow breaths.

  ‘Have some of this.’ Rebecca was offering me a bottle of cranberry juice. I sipped the juice while she fumbled inside her backpack until she found the grey plastic bug. ‘Back in a minute,’ she said.

  She walked to the edge of the pavement and dropped the bug inside a storm drain. Then she closed my door and walked around and climbed in beneath the steering wheel. She turned the ignition key a quarter-circle and powered down my window.

  ‘Better?’

  I nodded.

  ‘A shock?’

  I took another sip of the cranberry juice. Wiped my lips with the back of my hand.

  ‘You could say.’

  ‘Ready for more?’

  I nodded again. Stared out through the windscreen at the darkening sea. The crested waves. The sun was beginning to wane. The sky was blooming a pale violet.

  ‘Laura didn’t work in the City, Rob. At least, not in the way you think she did. She was an officer for British Intelligence. We both were.’

  I closed my eyes. Swallowed. Listened to the pop and crackle in my ears. ‘How long?’

  ‘She joined after me. I left within a year of her being there. That was four years ago. My guess is she was still working in intelligence when she died.’

  I released a long breath. Looked some more at the churning sea. What I was hearing seemed impossible to me. The story of another sister. Another life.

  But it could also explain why Laura had been so distant in the past few years. Her reluctance to share all but the most basic information about her life.

  ‘Are you saying my sister was a spy?’

  ‘Put simply.’

  ‘So why the false name?’

  ‘Protection. Self-preservation.’

  ‘But what if she met someone who knew her? Wouldn’t it blow her cover?’ Even as I said the words, they felt ridiculous in my mouth. How much of what you hear about intelligence work was pure fantasy? I couldn’t see Laura carrying a gun, seducing foreign agents, operating behind enemy lines.

  ‘Not everyone would do it,’ Rebecca said. ‘But it wasn’t a big risk for your sister. She’d spent most of her life on this island, remember.’

  ‘Not her university years.’

  ‘True. But you have to learn to compartmentalise.’

  I swivelled my head. Looked at her flatly. ‘Isn’t that just a fancy word for shutting yourself off?’

  ‘You sacrifice yourself to the work. That’s what it takes.’

  And, by the sounds of it, Laura had sacrificed her identity, too. The thought connected to something in my mind.

  ‘Mum said when she called you, she got the impression you didn’t know who Laura was.’

  Rebecca paused. Her eyelids fluttered. ‘That’s because to me, she was Melanie Fleming.’

  ‘Then how did you work out who Mum was talking about?’

  ‘For starters, it’s not every day someone phones me the way your mum did. Telling me that in the days before she died, Laura asked for me to be contacted if anything happened to her.’

  ‘It’s still a leap.’

  Rebecca took the cranberry juice from me. Screwed the lid back on. Tapped it with her nail. ‘Her middle name.’

  ‘Hendon?’

  Rebecca nodded. ‘When I was hedging with your mum, she repeated Laura’s name – only this time, she said all of it. Hendon’s not exactly common. I remembered it was Melanie’s middle name, too. Th
en everything else started to fit. Her age. Her description. The Isle of Man.’

  Hendon was Grandpa’s surname. Mum’s maiden name. Mum had been an only child and she’d wanted to keep the name alive in some way. So her first child had been christened Laura Hendon Hale. If there’d been a hyphen in it, it might have sounded posh, but not quite so unusual. Melanie Hendon Fleming didn’t sound any better.

  ‘So why you?’ I asked. ‘If you didn’t work with Laura for long, why did she want Mum to contact you in particular?’

  ‘I’ve wondered that myself.’

  ‘And?’

  Rebecca made a humming noise, as if what she was about to tell me was a little shaky. ‘We worked an assignment together when she first started. I wouldn’t say we were close, but I gave her some responsibility and I think she appreciated it. It’s never easy when you join. Especially as a woman.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘No. That’s not it. There was one time in particular. We had a conversation. Admitted to each other we were scared. It’s not something I’d have ever said to a male colleague. But I could say it to Laura. I trusted her. Looks like she trusted me, too.’

  A man in a hooded coat was approaching. He was walking a dog. Some kind of boxer. The dog had a tennis ball in its mouth and when he unhooked its lead it went tearing off along the slipway to the beach. I thought of Rocky and of how much I’d have preferred to be walking him right now.

  ‘So why did Anderson mention Melanie Fleming to me?’ I asked. ‘How would he know that I was related to her?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Did he mention her because there’s some kind of a connection between my sister and Lena?’

  ‘I don’t know that, either.’

  ‘You don’t know a lot.’

  ‘You’re angry with me.’ Rebecca circled her finger around the top of the juice bottle. Considered the view of the ocean through the windscreen. ‘But look at it from my point of view. You’re hurt, yes? You feel deceived, maybe. I suppose I didn’t see any reason to expose you or your parents to that unless it became necessary.’

  I stayed silent.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Truly.’

  I could feel a stinging in my eyes. Tears pricking the surface. I clenched my jaw.

  ‘Tell me your best guess,’ I managed. ‘My sister. Lena. Is there a link?’

  ‘It makes sense.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘The cottage. I found wires, yes? Surveillance equipment. But the gear wasn’t new. It had been there five, maybe ten years. My guess is that cottage was some kind of safe house. Probably established and wired by British Intelligence. But not used recently. So not completely abandoned, but at least halfway forgotten.’ She swirled the juice around. ‘A place like that – in Laura’s backyard – I reckon she’d know about it.’

  ‘Suppose you’re right,’ I said. ‘Does that mean she was over here spying on Lena?’

  Rebecca shook her head. ‘I think maybe she was helping to hide Lena. Think about it. The Isle of Man. Why would it occur to Erik to put Lena here of all places? Unless, maybe, your sister was involved in the decision.’

  A memory flashed through my mind. My first meeting with Lena, in the garage. The way she’d talked about the island. The scornful tone in her voice when she’d asked me what there was to do here to have fun. As if it was somewhere she couldn’t quite believe in. As if it was nowhere.

  ‘So the British intelligence services were helping to hide Lena,’ I said, like I was fitting it all together in my mind. ‘Working with Anderson and Erik. And that’s how they knew my sister.’

  ‘Maybe. It would certainly help to explain something else. Erik told us he worked to smother media coverage of Lena’s disappearance from London, and from the few scraps I could find on the web, I’d say the strategy was pretty successful. But I doubt he was capable of it alone. The Met are still looking to arrest Lena. They would have needed help from the press. So stopping the story from running would take more than just cash.’

  ‘What would it take?’

  ‘Influence. Power. The sort of influence and power that British Intelligence possess.’

  ‘OK,’ I said, trying to gather my thoughts. ‘But we still don’t know why Anderson mentioned the name Melanie Fleming to me.’ A burst of movement captured my attention. The boxer dog was streaking across the beach towards the sea. He plunged into the surf with a reckless leap. ‘Could the situation with Lena have had something to do with Laura’s death?’

  ‘Almost certainly.’

  I drew a halting breath. Closed my hand and pressed my nails into my palm. ‘Is it possible she didn’t kill herself?’

  ‘That’s what I plan to find out.’

  Chapter Twenty-five

  The dinghy’s engine was coarse and stank of petrol. A gassy plume hovered above the indigo water, curling in the chilly breeze.

  Ten long minutes, then the crunch of loose stones beneath the hull. Lena watched the younger man vault over the side. The water was up to his thighs, soaking his cargo pants. He waded forwards, dragging the boat behind him. The bald man waited until the dinghy was beached, then stepped cautiously into the foam of a fading wave. He turned to Lena and beckoned at her with the gun. She levered herself up from the floor and followed mutely.

  They lurked in silence in the cramped, dilapidated hut for what felt like half an hour, until the car arrived. Lena was careful to note that it was a blue Vauxhall Insignia with a UK number plate. Functional in design. No metallic paint or alloy wheels or tinted glass. The younger man pushed her forwards with one hand in her hair, pressing her head down, until she was forced into the rear.

  The man behind the wheel was as unremarkable as his car. Medium height, medium build. Short dark hair. A blue Oxford shirt over grey casual trousers.

  He drove in silence with the radio on low. Talk radio. The talk was about football.

  The older man was watching her from the corner of his eye. Looking for some form of engagement. She buried her fear deep inside herself and gave him nothing. She was sitting on the back seat between her two captors, peering hard through the windscreen, searching for markers she might remember. The gun was pressed into her side.

  It was warm in the car. The bald man sipped from a bottle of water. He offered some to Lena. She accepted and drank the whole thing. Tipped her head right back and held her mouth open beneath the bottle to catch the very last drop. Feeling pleased with herself, she gazed ahead through the glass at the two-lane road they were cruising along. The cars they were passing. The lighted road signs.

  Time passed. Then the car began to slow and veer off into a lay-by that was shielded by a copse of trees. Another Vauxhall Insignia. Another faceless man. He was leaning against the rear of the car, legs concealing the number plate. He moved aside as they pulled close and the boot lid popped up.

  A lamp blinked on. Lena could see a duvet. The cover was bright pink.

  She stiffened and leaned forwards, pressing her face between the front seats. Her shirt rode up at the base of her spine and she felt hands on her skin. The younger guy punched something sharp into her side. Lena gasped and turned to scratch at him. The man caught her by the wrist and started to count down from ten, that stupid leering grin fixed on to his face.

  Lena was out cold before he reached seven.

  *

  Lukas tucked the laptop under his sweater and hobbled away from the man’s home into the gathering dusk. The gravel beneath his feet sounded too loud to his ears. His movement was laboured and he was afraid of being challenged. He kept his head down and shied away from the big house to his side. He could feel eyes on him. Watching him. But he muttered encouragement to himself and shuffled on. The exit lurched closer with each awkward step. And then, almost before he knew it, the exit was behind him and he was hobbling away along a residential street.

  Lukas didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know how long it would take him to reach the hotel Anderson had me
ntioned, or even if he was heading in the right direction. There was a bus stop farther along the road, beneath a yellow street light, but Lukas had no cash in his wallet. He realised now that he should have searched the man’s home for money. Not that it helped. He couldn’t go back. He would have to go on.

  The walking wasn’t easy. His leg wound burned and itched beneath his makeshift dressing. His muscles were weak, his balance unsteady, and he hadn’t eaten a solid meal in days. He slowed and tried to control his palsied movements. Considered his reflection in the tinted glass of the bus shelter. A man with long hair, in need of a cut, grubby and unwashed, sheened in sweat. Dirt-smeared jeans and a worn sweatshirt. The bulge in his clothes from where he cradled the laptop. He looked like a tramp and he’d be certain to draw attention. Couldn’t avoid it. But he was lucky with the time. Mid-evening, when traffic was quiet.

  He followed the curving road downwards for half a mile. The neighbourhood was up on a rise and he could see the sea far below, stretching away from him like a vast, dark pool. He limped between the splashes of light from the street lamps, counting them off one after the other. A car passed. He imagined that he heard the driver slow, his passengers watching him closely. But the car didn’t stop. Nobody approached.

  He walked until the road opened up on his left. Some kind of shopping precinct. A lot of concrete and bricks and rusted metal bollards. Multiple parking spaces, most of them empty. There was a supermarket, too, lit brightly from within.

  A taxi was parked outside, close to a cash machine. It was a white Japanese minivan and the driver was a middle-aged woman. She was reading a tabloid newspaper. Lukas lowered his head and approached the cash machine. He withdrew a wad of notes and made his way inside the supermarket for a snack bar and water. When he came out, the taxi was still there. Lukas tapped on the window and waited for it to slide down. He said the name of the hotel he needed, pronouncing it like a question, and the woman backed off for a moment, as if doubtful, before nodding reluctantly and folding her newspaper away.